Four Female Artists vs. the Male Gaze at Garis & Hahn in New York

Gender
disparity is inextricable from art history. Traditionally, men are the
painters; women (often nude) are their subjects. Over the years, artists have taken up a number
of strategies to combat the oppression of the male gaze. Some, like Guerrilla
Girls, have campaigned for museums to display more work from female artists,
while others, like Cindy Sherman, have used their own bodies to explore the psychological
pains of a sexist culture.

“Beyond the Gaze: Women Painting Women,” a new group show at Garis
& Hahn in New York, brings together four
emerging female artists, each depicting the female nude in her own way. Their
canvases celebrate the female body without objectifying it, showing that it is
possible to portray naked women without playing into misogynistic visual tropes.

Sarah
Awad’s “Reclining Woman” triptych shows
three nude women lying down in similar poses, head in arms, feet curled
together. Yet the series renders each female in brilliant blues, yellows, and
soft pinks—combating the repetition of the figure. The outpouring of color threatens to dissipate the female body within the frame; it can often
take a moment of looking before the rapid brushstrokes coalesce into a female figure.

Such
fracturing of the body is picked up in Sarah
Faux’s Structure/Stricture (2015),
a work composed of fragmented triangles with glimpses of a body. In
Faux’s Untitled (2014), a single leg juts out from an otherwise abstract
composition. As opposed to Awad’s ecstatic paintings, Faux’s breakdowns of the
body create an unsettling sensation of anxiety.

Jay
Miriam’s richly textured canvases show
women in a style reminiscent of art brut and Jean Dubuffet. While
works like Woman and Headless Parrot (2015) border on the grotesque,
they also capture a raw sense of eroticism. Tatiana
Berg’s works, in contrast, make use of a
flat, cartoonish style. Here, the female body almost seems to bend and twist
as if hewn from rubber. Despite similarities
in subject, the four artists thus find unique means of using paint to explore the
complexities of female identity in contemporary culture.